"Though fatigued with a letter longer than any I have written for a long while, it would be better to go on for ever than awake to a sense of contrary winds. We expect to put into Portland Roads to-night. The captain, the crew, and the passengers are all ill-tempered and weary. I shall write to Dilke. I feel as if I was closing my last letter to you." The ship at last proceeded on her voyage, and in the Bay of Biscay encountered a severe squall. Keats soon afterwards read the storm-scene in Byron's "Don Juan": he threw the book away in indignation, denouncing the author's perversity of mind which could "make solemn things gay, and gay things solemn." Late in October he reached the harbour of Naples, and had to perform a tedious quarantine of ten days. After landing on the 31st,[13] he received a second letter from Shelley, then at Pisa, urging him to come to that city. The first letter on this subject, dated in July, had invited Keats to the hospitality of Shelley's own house; but in November this project had been given up, as "we are not rich enough for that sort of thing"--although Shelley still intended (so he wrote to Leigh Hunt) "to be the physician both of his body and his soul,--to keep the one warm, and to teach the other Greek and Spanish." Keats, however, had brought with him a letter of introduction to Dr. (afterwards Sir James) Clark, in Rome,--or indeed he may have met him before leaving England--and he decided to proceed to Rome rather than Pisa. Dr. Clark engaged for him a lodging opposite his own: it was in the first house on the right as you ascend the steps of the Trinita del Monte. The precise date when Keats reached Rome, his last place of torture and of rest, does not appear to be recorded: it was towards the middle of November. He was at first able to walk out a little, and occasionally to ride. Dr. Clark attended his sick bed with the most exemplary assiduity and kindness. He pronounced (so Keats wrote to Brown in a letter of November 30th, which is perhaps the last he ever penned) that the lungs were not much amiss, but the stomach in a very bad condition: perhaps this was a kindly equivocation, for by this time--as was ascertained after his death--Keats can have had scarcely any lungs at all. The patient was under no illusion as to his prospects, and he more than once asked the physician "When will this posthumous life of mine come to an end?" The only words in which the last days of Keats can be adequately recorded are those of Severn: our best choice would be between extract and silence. There were oscillations from time to time, from bad to less bad, but generally the tendency of the disease was steadily downwards. The poet's feelings regarding Fanny Brawne were so acute and harrowing that he never mentioned her to his friend. I give a few particulars from Severn's contemporary letters--the person addressed being not always known.